Category: Podcast

When you create a solution for TF2 players to come together and scrim you’d better not assume the project is ever done. No matter how good your solution is the players who use it day in and day out will find faults. If you let those faults fester they’ll grate on the players and eventually someone will step forward with a solution of their own. Marty thinks he’s that guy. Together with a coder their small team has been working in the shadows to bring TF2center.com to life. It is their hope that they can gather the comments and wishes of the TF2 community to provide an alternative to the unloved TF2lobby.

In this first interview I talk to Marty about the ideas they have for TF2center, how they hope to bring about change in just a few short months and what ground work they’ve laid down so far. He talks about the desire for player ranking and the need for a web designer with user interface skills. If you’d like to get involved with this project Marty can be contacted on his gmail, or you can drop a him a message in reddit.

When I first started chatting to Chris Shetter he was trailing off his career in eSports casting. For years he’d struggled to see the results from all his efforts in shoutcasting and was looking for ‘another way’ to make it fun again. Before this most recent chat we’d seen him pretty much give it all up. He’d moved with his wife to Seattle so even the “dc” moniker no longer held true.

Talking to him now it is as if he’d never left the scene though in reality he hadn’t. Choosing to blog sporadically about events in eSports that he found to be particularly irksome he’d kept a hand in. Now he’s drawing some old friends back together and exercising coding muscles to bring about a completely new eSports web service mm1.fm. Sticking to an audio only output he’s creating a web service that’ll run 24/7 gaming audio using a collection of current shows. Interrupting every so often with news updates from all aspects of gaming. The concept he likens to sports radio and is a far departure from the visual feasts of his tgbf.tv days.

i46 was a pretty big deal for everyone who either attended or watched the streams from the UK’s largest LAN party, hosted by Multiplay in Telford. That statement is true for a great many people (500+ listed Team Fortress 2 players under one roof including two visiting teams from NA) but especially so for Comedian and his merry band of shoutcasters representing VanillaTV. We take this chance to recap some of the things that went absolutely according to plan, including the 1milliion viewers on their twitch.tv live stream, as well as the things that didn’t like the day1 audio issues.

i46 may have contributed to the requirement for a slipstreamed method of editing, encoding and uploading video on demands (VODs) for VanillaTV. Comedian takes us through the current solution they have in place. It appears that Skyride has invested a great deal of time creating software to do the task of many men hours. Not to let his new found skills go to waste he’s now turning his attentions to Open Broadcast Software (OBS). This open source solution for live streaming stands as a new, cleaner and faster streaming solution with a small footprint allowing the casts play at a much higher quality level. Needless to say VanillaTV are looking to it rather than the paid-for alternative, XSplit, as the future of eSports casting. Skyride himself is working on plug-ins and has produced a rather nifty how-to for other casters.

Sadly it’s not all sweetness and light in the land of eSports casting. VanillaTV’s North American counterpart eXtelevision has undergone some dramatic upheavals this week. With some of the 6v6 casters looking to move out from the shadow of the main man Jeff eXtine. Comedian explains the position he was placed in and why he’s chosen to offer VanillaTV as a new home for these leavers. In doing so the American market opens up to him but at what cost to his friendship?

Lastly Comedian takes us through their hopes and plans for European conquest. Both Dreamhack in Sweden and Assembly in Finland are possibilities for 6v6 TF2 events though it’s impossible to ignore the problems that lay ahead in realising those dreams.

VanillaTV has many stars. The Team Fortress 2 shoutcasting site seems to collect tallent in much the same way Valve Software do. Not only has CUBE been able to find his own place but he’s rapidly reshaping their YouTube to page.

CUBE was with the original TFTV crew but initially decided not to come over to VanillaTF2 when VanillaTV was being formed. Since then he’s joined (arguably) the strongest Highlander team in Europe, SNSD. The team have won everything they’ve entered but in his opinion the competition is catching up.

Under his guidance their YouTube channel has changed from a repository of previous live shows into being a collection of brand new crafted content specifically for drawing in new subscribers; informing and teaching the public the finer points of competitive game-play.

The three new video sets are:

Insights – digging into an individual protagonist’s experience of a TF2 match

Analysis – an expert breaks down retrospectively some of the plays in a match

Frag movie review – frag movie makers critiquing the best frag movies the community has to offer